Food and vulnerability
Introduction
The world is being buffeted by large-scale socioeconomic and environmental changes. These changes may present farmers and entrepreneurs with new opportunities. However, these changes may mean farmers struggle to keep producing the food we depend on. I grew interested in this topic in the 1990s when I conducted a series of empirical studies in Canada where I tried to understand how socio-economic factors such as land tenure and free trade agreements affected land-management.
Unsurprisingly, the results of these studies suggest that farmers are significantly c onstrained by the socio-economic forces. This has led me to wonder whether the mainstream food production, which is based on producing a small number of commodities using energy-intensive inputs, is robust enough to withstand the sort of extreme weather that some scientists think may become common.
Click here if you are interested in the paper on land tenure.
Click here if you are interested in the paper on international trade.
Concurrently, I became interested in whether local food production, where producers and consumers have much more direct contact, may provide an antidote. Although promising, local food systems present a host of other problems. For example, as we face towards a future of uncertain climate patterns, it may be foolish to promote local food systems where an u nexpected drought, flood, windstorm or pest outbreak, may spark a local collapse. In this case, the global system might be better, since global trade should be able to move food efficiently to where it is most needed.
urban agriculture
This is especially true for the cities of the developing world where people neither have access to the land or resources that they need to produce food nor access to stable jobs to help them overcome economic down turns. As a result a major theme of my work has been on urban agriculture and I've been part of work in Thailand and Malawi on this topic.
Click here for the project website.
Theory
One of the problems is that we really don’t have the tools to tell whether our food system more or less robust than other more local systems and we have a very poor understanding of how farmers may adapt to prob lems like climate change. Without these sort of insights, our ability to predict the impact of climate change is very limited. For example, a lot of research has gone into predicting the impact of droughts and studies in this field tend to fall into one of two broad camps. Current work that tries to predict the impact of drought on food systems falls in two broad camps. The first is a modeling approach that couples crop yield models with climate prediction models to anticipate where food production may be adversely affected by drought in the future. Despite its considerable merits, this approach has struggled to capture how farmers will adapt to climate change. The second approach is driven by development studies and focuses on how communities have coped with environmental problems in the past. Work done in this area is generally on field work and has resulted in a good qualitative understanding of adaptation to drought. Little work has been done to integrate these qualitative assessments with formal climate prediction models.
As a result the work I’ve done tries to provide a bridge between the sophisticated models used by the climate scientists and the rigorous qualitative understanding my colleagues in development studies have about specific regions.
Historical cases
I'm also work on a popular book on the history of humanity's relationship with cattle that picks up on many of these themes. The story, as it is unfolding during our research is amazing. Because they could graze un-productive grasslands, creating meat, milk and muscle they were amazingly useful animals. Partly as a result of this utility, but also due to a host of other cultural factors, cattle became revered religious symbols and the economic back bone of many cultures. The modern age, however, tells a different story. We have created highly productive specialized breeds that focus on milk or meat production. We devote some of the earth's best agricultural land to produce a high calorie nutrient packed diet for these animals, and we keep them in economically efficient factory-like conditions that bring a host of ethical, epidemiological, and environmental concerns.
This project is a team effort between myself and Andrew Rimas, an American journalist. We are under contract with William Morrow, a division of Harper Collins, and is due out in 2008.
FUNDED PROJECTS
During my Ph.D. I was awarded a Social Science and Humanities Research Council fellowship. (value $60,000 Canadian)
The Simons’ Foundation provided a generous grant while I was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia between 2002-2003. (value $500,000 Canadian).
Urban agriculture work in Thailand was funded by the Canadian International Development Agency ($250,000 Canadian). Work on urban agriculture in Malawi has been done by a PhD student of mine, David Mkwambisi, and has been funded by the International Development Research Council ($20,000 Canadian)
The Economics and Social Research Council in the UK has funded me on a 3 year research fellowship to pursue this work. (value £320,000)
The Natural Science Research Council’s “Quantifying and Understanding Earth Systems”(QUEST) programme is funding a major project on the impacts of climate change (this is being led by Nigel Arnell at the University of Southampton). I am leading a work package on this project that will look at the impact of drought in China. (value of total project £1.75 million, of which I am responsible for £125,000)
Andrew Rimas, an American journalist, and I were recently awarded a contract by Harper Collins to translate much of this research into a popular book that will focus on humanity rich. colorful and sometimes deeply troubled relationship with cattle.